Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [16]
I take Riff to walk along the edge of the golf course. When I go into the PX, he lies outside by the door, waiting for me. In my backyard I sit close to him, watch the movement of his busy eyes, the back-and-forth movement of his tongue when he pants. Once, on a daring day, I call Paul Arnold, but I hang up before the phone rings. I lie on the living room floor, my legs up against the bookcase, contemplating human circulation.
One evening after dishes, Diane comes into my room. “What’s up?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
She holds up my bottle of Evening in Paris, checks the level, puts it carefully back down in place. “How come you’re all alone?”
“I’m doing my homework.”
“I mean alone all the time. Are you fighting with Cherylanne?”
“I don’t know. She is.”
“How come?”
“She’s just that way sometimes. She just is. She’s not my only friend.”
I am hoping Diane doesn’t ask for a list of others. She doesn’t. She stretches out on my bed. “Ummm,” she says. “You have a good bed.”
I get up from my desk, sit down beside her. “Diane?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever think about leaving, about running away?”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just … Nothing happened. I just think sometimes I’d like to live somewhere else.”
There is a shift in her face. “Where you’re not a punching bag, huh?”
It is too bold, how she does it. It is too much out.
“I don’t know, I mean just … I think I would just like to leave, that’s all. Go somewhere else.”
“Without Dad.”
“Well, yeah. I think he likes it here.”
Diane’s laugh is like a short cry. “I don’t. I don’t think he likes it anywhere.”
“If you asked Dickie, would he take you away?”
Diane stands up, goes over to my window. “If I asked Dickie to do anything, he would do it.” Her back is to me. The truth of what she is saying is in the line of her spine: she stands tall with it. Then she turns around, a half smile on her face. “Why? You want to come?”
I once wanted a certain ring for Christmas. It was a gold oval, and you could get your initials engraved in the center. It was too much, but I asked anyway. And one day in early December, when I was looking through my mother’s nightgowns in her dresser drawers, I found a velvet box with the ring inside it. My initials. In fancy, fragile script. I looked up. There was my face in the mirror, tight with happiness. I put the ring back, closed the drawer, waited until Christmas, and opened the box I knew it was in last.
“I would come,” I tell Diane.
She sighs. “I’m going to finish high school, Katie, and then I’m gone.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t bring you.”
“Oh, I know.”
She starts to say something, then stops. It is hard for her, what is in her face. She pulls her beautiful hair back, holds it for a moment in one hand. “You want to come swimming with us tonight? It’s open till ten.”
I nod.
“Okay,” she says. “We’ll do that.”
Even when Cherylanne and I are fighting, we don’t knock. I go into her house, yell, “Hello?” There are the smells I’ve missed: new carpet and the food and the sun trapped in the fabric of the sofa, that ironed smell. My mother: “Now, fold his handkerchiefs exact when you iron them. He likes them straight.”
I hear Cherylanne’s bedroom door open, and she starts to come down the stairs, then stops halfway to look coolly at me. “What?” Her hand is graceful on the railing, like she thinks she’s Loretta Young.
“I’m going swimming tonight with Dickie and Diane. You want to come?” This is it. If she says no, this is it.
There is a heavy moment of silence. She is wringing out the cloth but good. But then she shrugs, says, “I guess.”
Here happiness must be quiet and slow. I say, “So what are you doing now?”
“Come on up,” she says. She plays me a forty-five she bought yesterday. She shows me how she is now the darkest Coppertone girl possible, holding her skin next to the magazine page. She is right: she couldn’t be tanner. “You’ve moved up, too,” she says. “You’re in between the best and the next-best now. In a way that’s even better, because you still have a dream.” I show